My Year of Foreign Non-Flops

Nathan Rabin, one of the stable of excellent film critics at the Onion AV Club, is just wrapping up a project that he began last January (just around the time that I started this here bolge) called My Year of Flops. Twice a week, Mr. Rabin has been watching films that failed commerically and critically upon their release and reevaluating them. It's been some of the funniest, most insightful pop cultural writing I've read in a while, and, of course, it pisses me off that I don't write that well, and that I didn't think of the idea first. What I'm going to do instead is something that will probably be much less interesting to readers, but hopefully pretty edifying to me. I like to think of myself as a movie fan, and as far as modern American cinema is concerned, I'm reasonably well versed. Like most everyone, there are huge chunks of film history, films from different eras, of different genres, etc, that I'm hopelessly ignorant of. While my biggest deficiency is probably movies from before 1960 (they're like Victorian novels: I just can't get into them), the deficiency that bothers me the most is definitely my lack of modern foreign film knowledge. Sure, I know the titles and, in many cases, the basic plot synopsis and artistic points of view, of a whole lot of seminal foreign films, but I haven't actually sat down and watched most of them. I don't usually go for New Year's resolutions, but this year I'm making one that I will stick with: I'm going to watch a different classic of world cinema every week for the next year and post my reactions here. Like Mssr. Rabin's project, there will be no rhyme or reason to the selections: whatever pops up next in my Netflix queue. Coming soon: Luis Bunuel's 1972 masterpiece The Discree Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Why start with this one? Well, I've heard it's really great, and the title is pretty neat. We'll see how that works out. Expect in the immediate future some Kurosawa, Herzog, Truffaut, Fellini, Godard, Rossollini, and, to mix things up, Alejandro Jadorowsky. Hopefully, a year from now I will be at least 52 times more pretensious.